NYFF33: Gianni Amelio’s "Lamerica"

“The Italian cinema is perhaps the quintessential social cinema,” read the program notes for this year’s Open Roads festival. Indeed, few national cinemas have managed to retain such a strong degree of social consciousness through countless aesthetic and stylistic upheavals. The neorealist legacy has exerted a powerful hold over the nation’s cinematic imagination, even from beyond the grave: most of Italy’s great filmmakers, even the most iconoclastic, took political engagement as a given, a starting-point, something so essential it wasn’t even worth mentioning. The work of Bertolucci, Pasolini, and Antonioni doesn't just have a political dimension; it is political by necessity, aesthetically original by choice (Fellini alone pushed politics to the sidelines, in favor of autobiography). So when we say that a contemporary film re-ignites the spirit of neorealism, it's worth noting that the fire never really died.

Lamerica(NYFF '95), though, which screens tonight as part of our ongoing 50 Years of the New York Film Festival series, feels like a true successor to the neorealist tradition—aesthetically as well as thematically. Like the best work of Rossellini (whose epochal War Trilogy played alongside Lamerica at the 33rd NYFF) and De Sica, it’s both timely and timeless, transforming a contemporary political issue—in this case, the destitution of post-communist Albania, whose citizens dream of new lives in Italy—into a fable-like story of guilt and redemption. Enrico Lo Verso plays Gino, a sneering con man who schemes with his brother to get rich off of the Albanians' misery. The sap they choose to run their phony business venture, an aging political prisoner named Spiro (the heartbreaking Carmelo di Mazzarelli), promptly goes missing, and Enrico follows him into the heart of a ruined nation.

[This next paragraph contains spoilers] Enrico is almost impossibly callous, and his cynicism looks all the more rotten in comparison with the ever-hopeful Armenian emigrants around him: at one point he interrupts their exultant refrains of “I’m proud to be Italian” with a bitter “at best, you’ll all be dishwashers.” Spiro, who, as it turns out, is actually Italian, believes he’s still twenty, a young soldier with a wife and child awaiting him back home. “The war ended fifty years ago,” Enrico bluntly informs him. “Your wife’s probably dead.”

Yet Spiro still hopes, as do all the smiling immigrants who surround Enrico in the film's heartbreaking finale. We don't see Enrico’s final breakthrough into empathy (the closest we get is a brief but lovely shot of him staring into space, Spiro’s sleeping head resting on his shoulder), but somehow we feel the change, the shock of seeing those who have reason to curse life believe desperately and unreservedly in a better future. In its final moments Lamerica shows us why the Italian cinema has so doggedly clung to its role as a social arbiter, as if it had no other choice: the faces of all its subjects are marked irrevocably by the history of their nation, just like the decrepit cities around them. Italian filmmakers treat the close-up like a dossier: a record of social upheaval and a spur to empathy and action. From the wide-eyed young son in Bicycle Thieves to Accatone’s street toughs and Monica Vitti’s haughty desperation, from the smiling immigrants of Lamerica to the fearful immigrants of Ermanno Olmi's The Cardboard Village (screening directly afterwards at 8:50pm in Open Roads), each face galvanizes, challenges, accuses. When every pair of eyes it captures is a call for compassion, how could the Italian cinema have become anything but our social authority, our moral law?

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